Sitting at my desk at Procter and Gamble one day a call came in from one of our brand groups. They said, “We need your help to solve a nagging problem. We have some very ambitious advertising claims we want to use on television, but the claims are very controversial and we’ll need to get the legal departments approval, and legal is tough. We’re trying to figure out a way to get around legal and get these claims on television.”

When we met to plan what to do, I asked them who might be the people we would have in a problem solving meeting. They mentioned several names, and I noticed that none of them were from the legal department. Being young and innocent, I asked, “Why don’t we have anyone from legal?” They looked at me benevolently, a real rookie, and said, “Look, kid, we don’t want them in here. We want to get around them.” Without thinking, I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind, “Who knows more about getting around legal than legal? Let’s bring them in to help us figure out a way to get these claims into practice.”

We scheduled a problem solving session inviting people from legal to figure out how to preserve and adapt the claims without compromising their impact. In less than a day, we were successful. Using the Simplexity process, we solved a problem that normally would have taken ten or eleven months of wrangling messaging back and forth.